These are surprisingly scary for a lot of people, out of all proportion to their size and partly because of their speed of movement. I've even heard someone on the radio say that although he breeds *tarantulas, he gets nervous of the house spiders he encounters at home.

* The word "mygale" is a synonym for "tarantula", and it's probably the more correct term too.

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"Do you know what's right, what's wrong? Somehow, somewhere, a beautiful simple thing, a single morality, a single set of standards, was smashed like an atom into 10 million pieces. And now – now what's right for a man can be wrong for his business, what's right for his business can be wrong for his country, and what's right for his country can be wrong for the world."

"Route 66", Stirling Silliphant

"We have lost faith in any of the large available understandings of how structural change takes place in history, and as a result, we fall back on a bastardised conception of political realism, namely that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it approaches what already exists."

Have to admit I find that video disturbing now. It looks like it was taken by the owner of one of these spiders who set the thing up to film what would happen; instead of feeding the spider a dead mouse which had been killed humanely, I'm guessing he released a mouse near the spider's lair. Feels almost if not actually sadistic to me in fact.

Do spiders take dead prey? I think it has to be live and kicking or they don't indentify it as food.

Close, Felix, but not quite;

What do they eat?

Insects, mainly. Spiders digest their food externally. They will generally only eat live food, although some will accept dead prey and some big spiders will apparently eat small pieces of raw meat. After catching and killing their prey, tarantulas inject it with powerful digestive enzymes that liquefy the insect's contents. When the insides have been sufficiently liquefied, the tarantula sucks the insect dry and throws away the empty husk.